Finished a Few Stories

Monday was January 15th, and I had yet to complete a story in 2018.  I'd been working (in theory) on Transformation Story and also intending to go back and fix Enigma, which I have listed as a finished story but I had looked at it and discovered that it wasn't quite done.

Enigma and Transformation Story were part of a series of stories focusing on Black Dahlia and a few other characters, including the Gentleman Brawler and Kid Enigma.  I had wanted to write a story about what happened to the Gentleman Brawler after the events in my Secret Crisis Wars story.  At the end of that, he's alive again but nobody else knows, and he's disguised in some way -- the godlike creature known as the Reality Bender gives him a new look.  But I'd never revealed anything beyond that.  I plotted a story that might or might not also include Kid Enigma, and for now that story is called Tremors of the Earth.

Likewise, at the end of Secret Crisis Wars Kid Enigma is given the ability to change people's genders, but is himself trapped as a rather feminine hermaphrodite, unable to use her abilities on herself.  I wanted to tell a story about what happened next -- she had plans to make some money with her ability, just as Black Dahlia had done, but as I worked on the idea, I decided they might instead team up and pool their abilities.  That story is of course Enigma.

At some earlier point that story was also what I intended with Transformation Story, which is why it was called that.  But that story turned into an introduction to demonic lawyer Mal's niece.  And that's the story that I've been trying to finish for weeks.

On Monday... I actually finished it.  I re-titled it Miss Devastation, which makes a lot more sense given the events of the story.

In the meantime I'd also written another story called Unique which involved Black Dahlia and started out as a kind of aside to one of these other stories.  Plus I decided to write a kind of prequel to Enigma which is mostly an idea at the moment.  It's called The Dream Ends.

So in what I think is chronological order, that's:

Tremors of the Earth
The Dream Ends
Miss Devastation
Unique
Enigma

That's my little quintet of Black Dahlia/Miss Enigma/Gentleman Brawler stories.  Enigma needs to be finished and Tremors of the Earth and The Dream Ends are mostly unwritten at present, but at least I finished one of them this week.  ^_^  Also, for some reason I seem to be completing them in reverse chronological order.

Then, since that wasn't enough, I wrote a second story Monday.  I was reading stories available to post in my blog, and one of them called Gadda Da Vida involved a sidekick that I wanted to write more about.  The story sort of suggests that this sidekick might join the Society of Intergalactic Space Babes, but ends before I follow up on that idea.  I had wanted to write a sequel dealing with that.

So I did.  I plotted and finished Eve the Explorer on Monday, making it two stories in one day.

I sort of thought that I might even work on a third story Monday, but I went home and did little about it.  But Tuesday I plotted another sequel story that would allow me to insert a little of the Cisgender Sleuth's background.  I have a tendency to create sidekicks without much thought, and then after the fact come up with their backgrounds, which often requires me to write a separate story so that I can explain said background.  This is what caused me to write As High As the Falcon, for example -- I wanted to explain who HighSis was and how she got her powers.

By the time I was done Tuesday evening, I had a new story that, as usual, went off in a different direction from where I started.  However, it's a complete story, my third in two days.  I called this one Beautifully Engineered.  Part of it required me to reread bits of The Ring of Hanubatum, and now I want to reread the whole thing and fix it up.  It's a long story and I remember it had some problems.

But I'm happy to have written three new stories, and I'm happy that all of them were things I was already working on or had planned to do some time ago.  ^_^

December Story Month Wrap-Up, and New Year's Goals

I was intending to do a wrap up of my December Story Month.  It's already 10 days into the new year and I somehow let that plan completely slip by.  In any case, my plans to work on a new story every day of the month and/or write about a thousand words a day fell by the wayside, just like my plans for NaNoWriMo in November did.

In the end I accomplished in December about what I normally manage to accomplish:  I finished six stories with varying degrees of success:  Enigma, Silence Is Golden, Fund My Catgirl, The Christmas Gorilla, Unique, and Experience Pays.  Two of those desperately need a rewrite.  The last one I managed to complete in time to post it for Christmas week -- my plan is always to post a Christmas story by Christmas, and this year the first one I wrote had some problems.

My goal for January is pretty much like my goals for December and November:  I want to finish the story I'm calling Transformation Story for now, and I want to go back and work on some of my Kid Anarchy Companion stories that I was working on this fall (and really, ideas I've been working on since last year).  I haven't made any new big proclamations about how much I'm going to write in January, and to be honest it's 10 days in and I've done very little writing at all.

What I wrote this year, to the best of my knowledge:

Book 8 Stories (High Tech Fisticuffs):

Gate Into Danger (story 243)
Beside Myself
Ghost and Miss Bloodraven
Murderbot 150
My Sister the Computer
If You're In Berlin
Tell Me A Story
Raw Justice
Elixir
Vigil
The Ring of Hanubatum
Fist to the Face
Breakable
New League of Two-Fisted Justice
Upgrade
Ghost Cop

Book 9 Stories (My Gun Is Sharp):

Secret Millicent
Dreamquest of Unknown Anarchy
Down the Drain
By Any Other Name
Mummy Dearest
Brain Salad
Second Law My Metal Ass
Lingua Franca Fractura
Grimdark Wonderland
Dues Ex Machina
My Clone Sleeps Alone
Feeling Wordy
Games People Play
Another Time Another Place
Clownface
There Goes the Neighborhood
Splitting Hares
Clown With the Golden Mask
Cryptid
The Summoning
Monumental Error
Gods and Punks
Time Trip
Motivational Poser
Market Crash
Hurricane Punch
As High As the Falcon
Gadda Da Vida
Return of the Holy Terror
Edgewise
Black Friday
Enigma
Silence Is Golden
Fund My Catgirl
The Christmas Gorilla
Unique
Experience Pays (story 295)

That's 54 stories written in 2017, so that's a good amount in my book.  That also makes 38 stories in what I'm calling Book 9, so after due consideration I've decided that Book 9 is mostly complete, except for three or four possible stories:

My Gun Is Sharp.  This is the title of the book, so I feel like there ought to be a story with that title as well.  But maybe not.
The Devil and Miss Elsie.  This story is related to Secret Millicent and also to the Ring of Hanubatum from the previous Book 8.  I need to finish it.
Transformation Story.  This is closely related to Enigma, Unique, and to another incomplete story that I want to finish, The Tremors of the Earth.
The Tremors of the Earth.  A Gentleman Brawler story related to Enigma, Unique, and Transformation Story.

I've created three new book files:
Book 10 - The Companions.  This would be a proposed book dealing entirely with Kid Anarchy and all of his companions, and the publication of a book about them.
Book 11 - Fist to the Face.  This is a proposed book for more random, unrelated stories that I will write in the coming year, similar to what I did for Books 8 and 9.
Book 12 - Magical Girl Death Match.  I wrote up a treatment for a novel-length story.  I don't know that I'll write it, but Now it's officially a book, just like Book 7 is my other novel-length story that I haven't finished.

I did not go back and finish any stories in older books that I can remember.  I still have a few stories I'm supposed to finish from previous books.

My goals for last year were:

So for 2017 my goals are going to be simple:  1.  Keep Writing a Grandpa Anarchy story a week so that I can keep publishing on my story blog,  2.  Try to finish at least one of my original fantasy stories, and 3.  Try to publish my book, as well as prepare books 2 and 3.  But that will also required 4.  Rewrite World of Hero.  Again.

Although I only accomplished goal #1, managing to publish a new story to my blog nearly every week has been a big accomplishment in my book.  At some point (in August I think) I stopped printing an extra "Classic Anarchy" story on the first Thursday of the new month, and I've been pretty lazy about publishing a new story right on Monday -- sometimes it's Tuesday or Wednesday, or even late Friday.  But I only skipped a week once -- after a year of doing this, I figured missing on a single week was allowed.  ^_^


Going forward, my goals for 2018 would be similar, but I also want to make completing those Book 9 stories a goal, and working on the Companion stories, and maybe also working on the Magical Girl Death Match novel, possibly for spring Camp NaNo.

That's it for goals for the year.  ^_^

December Story Month Update 12/11/17

My December Story Month is not going quite as well as I would have liked.  I went into the end of last week hoping to finish up Transformation Story (and give it a better title) and also one other shorter story.  By Sunday I hadn't really worked much on either, but I managed to complete a third scene for Transformation Story, so that's something.  I envision it being 5 or 6 scenes in total, so it's at least half written.

Monday I got to work on a story called Silent Spectre which I had listed as my story for day 2, and I managed to finish it.  Very short story, 718 words.  I renamed it Silence Is Golden.  I also did a bit more work on Transformation Story, and that led to a new story idea which I've currently titled My Little Catgirl.  I'm not sure I have a good ending/punchline for that one yet, but I wrote a bit on it.

I also was toying with the idea that my current sidekick raised the money to be transformed into a catgirl (Black Dahlia can do things such as this via magic, but charges a million dollars to keep the number of applicants down) via crowdfunding on the web.  That's the central idea in my new story, actually -- that you could actually raise that kind of money because of the number of fanboys (and fangirls) out there who would enjoy seeing an actual catgirl in action.  So I'm trying to work up what kind of prizes she would offer at various pledge levels, and I also was trying to decide whether I should mention a real/existing crowdfunding site, or make one up that is more superhero related.  I'd done something similar in the past, so I tracked down that story, Startup, and discovered that what I'd previously proposed was a villain-themed site called Lairbuildr that exists on the darkweb.

While that wasn't really helpful to my current story, I read through the story and realized I liked it quite a bit, so I decided to post it as my story of the week.  It's definitely one of those that is short and sweet and works really well in my opinion -- it has a good punchline.

I still want to finish up Transformation Story, and rewrite the ending of Enigma, but this week I need to work on my Christmas ghost story, which for now is the story I thought up last week called The Library of Dreams.  I also dug up another old story idea and called it my story idea for yesterday... I didn't write down any stories for Friday or Saturday and I'm not sure I'll go back and do that after the fact, so for now here's my list for the month:

December Story Month 2017

Day 1:  Arachnope
Day 2:  The Silent Spectre / Silence Is Golden(finished)
Day 3:  Enigma (finished, needs rewrite)
Day 4:  The Library of Dreams
Day 5:  Transformation Story  (half written)
Day 6:  The Tremors of the Earth
Day 7:  The Deal
Day 8:  
Day 9:
Day 10:  Top Hats and Bustiers
Day 11:  My Little Catgirl

Story Month Update Dec 6 2017

Today is Day 6 of my "December Story Month 2017" which is where I try to do a lot more writing than I managed for NaNoWriMo.  My plan is to work on a new story each day, but also to finish at least some of these stories.  I'm being hampered a bit in that goal by the fact that I keep coming up with longer-than-normal stories, but I figure I'll just keep plugging away at them and see what I can accomplish.

So far here's what I've come up with:

Day 1:  Arachnope  This is an old story idea that I pulled up and started writing on.  I didn't get too far but I have an idea of how I want the story to go, if I can find the time to finish it.

Day 2:  The Silent Spectre  I didn't actually write Saturday but I've listed this story as my story for that day.  It's just a two-line idea right now about a villain who never speaks.

Day 3:  Enigma (finished, needs rewrite)  I sort of finished this story Sunday but I've already come up with two ideas for better endings.  One of them I saved to a file called The Deal since it seemed to better work as a separate story.  I still need to rewrite this so that it works better.

Day 4:  The Library of Dreams  This is a Christmas ghost story that I came up with Monday after watching an anime Sunday.  It's only about 1/4 written.

Day 5:  Transformation Story.  This is another old story idea which ultimately has nothing to do with the title.  I may rename it One of the Girls.  This introduces the niece of demonic lawyer Mal.  I've written part of this one in the last 24 hours, and I'm working on it today, but it's nowhere near finished.

Day 6:  The Tremors of the Earth.  This is also an old story, this and Enigma and Transformation Story are sort of a trilogy about a certain group of characters.  I have ideas about how this story will work, but not very much of it is written down.  I'm also writing them in reverse order, for some reason.

I will probably wind up listing The Deal as my story for tomorrow.  It's something I've worked on a bit this week already.

So basically I have six or seven stories partially written, one of them "complete" except that I immediately began tearing it apart again.  A reasonable goal would be to finish my rewrite of Enigma, and maybe also finish up Transformation Story and at least one other by the end of the week.  I do need to be working on the Christmas Ghost story.

Post NaNo 2017 Report

Last month I planned to jump into NaNoWriMo, and I posted to my blog on the 2nd day with plans to chronicle my journey throughout the month.  This would mean more writing on top of trying to write 50,000 words, but I didn't see a problem with it.  I wrote that I was working on a novella-length story called The Companions:  Body Snatchers of Ator (Io, Yan, the title has changed a few times).

Well... I didn't finish that story, and I didn't write any more blog posts.  I ultimately failed my NaNoWriMo goals.  I didn't really keep track but I may have written 10,000 to 12,000 words during the month.  I finished four stories -- which has been about my average over the last year plus.

The more detailed rundown is this:  I worked on Body Snatchers of Ator, but I got bogged down and wasn't feeling inspired.  After several days of this I started working on a different Kid Anarchy story called The Companions:  All In Good Time, about Kid Anarchy's first meeting with Happy Jack.  In theory this was going to be a shorter story, but once I got into it it transformed into a longer one and I got bogged down again.

I switched up and wrote a short story, Gadda Da Vida.  (I may also have written As High As the Falcon in early November -- at this point I can't remember.)  After another week I managed to turn out Return of the Holy Terror and Edgewise, and over Thanksgiving weekend I wrote Black Friday.

That was it for my month -- four completed short stories, work done on two longer stories.

I decided for December that I was going to at least start a new story each day, but so far that hasn't really gone well.  On Friday Dec 1st, I began work on an old story idea called Arachnope, but I didn't really get that far on it.  I was still thinking about it on Saturday when I began working on another old story idea called Enigma.  I actually wrote quite a bit on Enigma Sunday night -- really my first writing of the month -- but what I got was a story with little conflict.  But I think I know how to fix it, and sometimes you have to write a bad story before you know how to write a good one.

That's been it so far.  I have potentially one or two other stories that are connected to the ideas in Enigma, so I may get at least two stories out of that, but so far I've only "began" two stories this month and neither are complete yet.  But at least I'm writing.

I'm supposed to write a Christmas ghost story as well, and I had some ideas for one this morning based on an anime I was watching over the weekend.

2017 NaNoWriMo Journal Day 1

I'm not the sort who stays up until midnight so that I can get an early jump on National Novel Writer's Month.  I've done this a number of years and I'm quite confident in my ability to keep up the pace with my writing, so I'm very content to write starting in the daytime after a good night's sleep.

This year NaNoWriMo found me in the middle of a long, possibly novella-length Grandpa Anarchy story.  I had been planning to write more stories about the companions that Kid Anarchy fought with in the 1920's, and I wanted at least one of these stories to be set in outer space.  Originally I was planning to write a story based on a Pulp-O-Meter title, Secrets of the Shrieking Forrest, which I envisioned as an adventure on another world with Lady Prometheus and Elias Nova.  But checking my timeline, Elias Nova was born in 1923, while Lady Prometheus worked with Kid Anarchy from 1920 to 1921.

I decided instead to write a story involving Dr. Thomas Nova (father of Elias) and to set it in 1922, a year before the birth of Elias.  This meant that the companion at the time was Machine Gun Molly, someone I hadn't written about yet.  I also had a sudden strong desire to tell a brain-swap / body-snatcher story in the mold of Edgar Rice Burrough's A Mastermind of Mars, possibly the first story of that sort I evere read, and one of the earliest in the genre in any case.  I dug out my copy and started rereading it, but when I got around to writing my story, quite a lot of what I came up with was nothing like the Burroughs novel.

I made decisions based on wanting to tweak or play with the idea that aliens could look just like humans -- and not only that, but like European Caucasian men.  You know, what kind of story would Superman have been if he were more African or Asian?  Suppose a brilliant inventor builds a starship in 1910, travels to another star (we'll just say the closes to earth, Proxima Centauri), and he finds aliens that can pass for human -- but of African descent?  That sounded like a fun twist.

I built up my story, adding in a brother of Machine Gun Molly, and a cripped boy who was the neighbor of Dr. Nova and was going to recieve a new, healthy body.  That's the purpose of the trip -- Dr. Nova has been to this planet once before and now has a much faster ship and a reason to go back.

I called this story The Bodysnatchers of Io at first, then came up with names for the planets they were visiting and renamed it The Bodysnatchers of Yan, but for some reason it was a planet called Ator where the bodysnatching happened, so I eventually renamed it again to The Bodysnatchers of Ator.  I kind of like Yan for the title more, but I was too lazy to go through the entire story swapping the names of the two planets.

I wrote a lot of half-scenes and bits of dialog as I fleshed out my idea and developed a plot, and by the time I was done I had a first scene mostly written, but a lot of incomplete and partial scenes after that.  Still, it was over 16,000 words, and probably less than half done.

I was going to try and get this story finished before NaNoWriMo but I failed the write anything most of the last five days of October.  So on November 1st I made note of how much was written on the story, and I set about writing the second scene.

I did a lot of research on starships of the 1920's.  There is a lot of art from the 20's and 30's so I created a Pinterest Pin named Starship 1920 and added anything I could find to it that seemed to fit.  I found more stuff searching for Steampunk starships and Steampunk blasters than I did trying to search for 1920's starships, but eventually I had a nice selection of stuff to look at as needed.  I downloaded E.E. Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol, since it was one of the earliest stories I could think of that definitely had starships in it.  I was curious how he would describe them.

Finally I committed a few lines to describing the ship as it landed at the alien planet, and proceeded to write about 1,000 words of the second scene.  I wanted this to be a classic rocket ship like people envisioned back then -- sleek, with wide fins that it would rest on when it landed.  I had fun with a description of the interior of the ship as well -- what would someone in the 1920's consider futuristic and modern?  Lots of brass dials and switches and levers, flashing lights, maybe space sonar, leather seats, inlaid wood dashboard.  Rivets and shiny steel.  Very modern indeed!

I'm not necessarily convinced that this story is worth writing at this point, but I'm going to have as much fun with it as I can.  If I finish, there's always Oz on the Half Shell to complete, and even World of Hero if I can get to it.

For now, I'm a bit behind thanks to wasting so much time researching things like what a 1920's starship should look like, and when were words like robot and cyborg first used.  But I can catch up quickly.  I'm planning to keep a journal here of how my NaNoWriMo challenge progresses -- and I'm not even counting any of this writing in my NaNoWriMo total.  ^_^

"Ator is also where I learned about body swapping," said the scientist.  "There are shops where you can peruse a selection of human and alien bodies and, once you've paid for your selection, your brain is removed and placed within the new body.  It's an ingenious operation, unlike anything possible on earth, or even by most races within the empire.  Only the Shoyuengo are able to manage it -- weird alien creatures, blue and green and purple, with dozens of thin, octopus-like tentacles with which they perform the most delicate of surgeries.  Every body shop has a family of them in their employ, and it's said that theirs is one of the richest species in the galaxy.

"I befriended the owner of one such shop.  His name is Ancel Arratamok, and his shop is called Body By Design.  He likes to give to charity and help out people in need.  One thing that he does is give out flesh and blood bodies to those who need them, in exchange for for a month's work for him and his shop.  He said he would donate a body for my friend Jason here, if I helped him with the body snatchers."

"Body snatchers?" Kid Anarchy asked.

"Indeed!   They're a big problem on Ator.  They remove your brain and place it in a box that allows for vision, sound and voice, and will keep you alive for up to thirty days.   Then they make off with your brainless body to sell on the black market."

"It's come to something when not even your body is safe from being stolen," Kid Anarchy said.

"The cost for a young, healthy body can be quite high," said Dr. Nova, "multiple times the average yearly salary, so I'm told.  I could never afford one.  That's why Ancel's offer is so generous.  Of course, he promises only one of the cheapest bodies in his shop, but still -- I had to take advantage of it."

"And you invited Kid Anarchy and I along for extra muscle," Molly said.  "Makes sense."  She cocked her tommy gun and added, "Don't you worry, Doc -- Kid Anarchy and I will bust those fluky gimlets in no time flat, just like we broke up that woofy Vizinni gang!  Am I right?"

"Danged straight," Kid Anarchy replied.  "You point us at them, Doc, and we'll mow 'em down."

NaNoWriMo Approaches

My big plan for last week, and then for the weekend, was to finish up a story I've been working on currently titled The Bodysnatchers of Yan.  This is one of my Companion stories, set in 1922, and it's also a space opera story of sorts involving Dr. Thomas Nova.  It's a pretty long story at this point, novella-length, and I wanted to finish it up before NaNoWriMo began on November 1st.  But I also wanted to write a Halloween-themed or spooky story of some sort to publish for Monday or Tuesday.

Anyway I was lazy and wrote nothing all weekend.

I reread what I wrote last year.  I worked hard on an old fanfic story of mine called Nerima All-Stars, which is sort of a Ranma/Ah My Goddess crossover, and sort of a superhero story.  I like the idea, and I really like much of what I wrote last year, but I'm not prepared to publish another unfinished fanfic story, I want to complete it first.  So working on that this year is an option, I might be able to finish it off with another 50,000 words.

But I also have several long-form Grandpa Anarchy stories that I'd like to complete.  There's the always-close-to-completion Oz On The Half-Shell that I've worked on a couple of times during previous NaNo events.  There's my old novella World of Hero that is supposed to take place in book two, that I would really like to finally finish.  Then there's this new story, Bodysnatchers of Yan, which I'd like to finish as well.  In fact I have a whole set of Companion stories in mind, and working on those could easily be my NaNo project.

There's also two other long stories that I've had on the back burner for a long time:  the Black Moon Maidens story Second Class, and the Serial Anarchy novel.

Right at the moment I'm leaning towards finishing up Bodysnatchers of Yan and Oz On The Half-Shell, and then maybe working on World of Hero.  That means leaving Nerima All-Stars for another day.

Of course, I need to work on my other fanfic Girl's School as well....